deadly sins
by Sora G. Silverwind
Summary: luxuria. gula. avaritia. acedia. ira. invidia. superbia.
1. luxuria

**deadly sins**  
_**by Sora G. Silverwind**_

**Summary****: luxuria. gula. avaritia. acedia. ira. invidia. superbia. **

**Rating****: PG-13.**

**Author's notes****: I really wanted to be able to use the canonical forms of the characters here, but in order to make some of the sins fit to certain knights, I had to really stretch things, even when using the human forms of these characters. If you put on your rose-colored glasses, you can see me flailing frantically behind the prose going "OMG! NO WAI! DUNNO WHUT IM DOIN!"**

**Hoping to get out a counterpart fic with the heavenly virtues. Because everyone seems to forget about them, the poor goody-goodies.**

**Fun fact – the sins are listed in order from least serious to most serious. Well, according to Wikipedia, anyway.**

**Disclaimer****: The seven deadly sins belong to Catholicism...right?**

**Special thanks to****: Blackeri on deviantArt for her gorgeous Deadly Sins series, Nightwish's "Dark Passion Play" album, and Poe's "Haunted" album.**

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_**luxuria - lust**_

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Regulus was not the first man in her life in the literal sense of the phrase, not by a long shot. He probably would not be the last, she suspected.

Yet Zoniha knew that Regulus—shadowy, aloof, colder than cold—awakened something special within her. Something powerful...something primal.

She often wondered if he knew it, often wondered if he _felt_ it too. It was funny, she thought. The two of them could spar together for an hour, and Zoniha would feel nothing but the rush of battle. But a single accidental (or not-so-accidental?) touch on her arm flooded her with white-hot _desire_. The desire to conquer, the desire to _be_ conquered. It would haunt her for nights on end.

Damn him and the secrets he kept, the secrets that he promised. Out of any man in her long life, Regulus was the one Zoniha had known the longest...and yet knew the least about.

But one day, she swore.

One day, she would possess him.

Completely and perfectly.


	2. gula

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_**gula – gluttony**_

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Well, why _shouldn't_ he live in luxury?

He deserved it for surviving—nay, practically ruling—the streets of Cerbera, Charade on Thantos.

Kill or be killed, steal or be stolen from, exploit or be exploited: all this and more were the laws of Cerbera.

Behemos' life, from birth to the leading the Basilisk Cross, would have broken other men.

But he...he had _succeeded._

He felt no empathy with the families on the blocks that he ruled, the ones that he extorted money from at whim or threatened when he had to. Why should he? When his own family had been stolen from, when an uncle of his had been murdered in cold blood, no one else had cared. There had simply been no point to it.

He had seen the good life when he had been on the outside, and he had resolved to live it one day.

Now he did.

The best, the biggest, the most dangerous—he owned as much of it as he could get his hands on, though legit means or otherwise.

After all the shit he went through to get to the top, he damn well deserved the good life.

And no upstart dark-haired pretty boy from the Obsidian Phoenix was going to take that away from him.


	3. avaritia

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_**avaritia – greed**_

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At six, Baelfael had mastered mathematics.

At twelve, Baelfael had mastered the sciences.

At eighteen, Baelfael had mastered fire.

But the one thing he had never, ever mastered was his desire to know everything.

He read the books. He conducted the experiments. He pieced together the formulas, he created the technologies, he earned the degrees and gave the talks. Many people admired him. He admired no one, not even himself, reserving his awe for the beauty of science.

In his desire to know everything, Baelfael lacked the desire to know anyone.


	4. acedia

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_**acedia – sloth**_

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Too many times, the visions came in his sleep, when he was least likely to regard them with any importance.

He was a culinary student by day, one who could get by but wasn't likely to win any awards for his work. He cooked for himself only; he didn't believe anyone else would particularly enjoy his recipes, simple as they were. No one seemed to care.

At night, he communed with a godlike avian creature. He lived in a city in the sky and rode on the winds. He walked among winged humans who adored him.

All of which was just nonsense, of course. Why would _anyone_ adore him?

He was nothing special. His parents far preferred his younger sister, the precocious yet utterly vapid Tivona who would probably become a movie star with a decent singing career on the side and a rich director husband to cater to her every whim. They'd been disappointed in his Y chromosome—girls were far more valuable and respected. Sure, he could sometimes cause little breezes and read voices on the wind, but there was no way his parents would believe him on that. For them and everyone else, he was one in fifty million. He could get by in life just by waking, eating, and sleeping, and no one would be any the wiser.

So he did.

And thus Ashtarth resigned himself to mundanity and obscurity until the end of time.


	5. ira

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_**ira – wrath**_

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There were so many things in his life he wanted to destroy that Molok wasn't sure where to start.

Zoniha would be a good candidate as his first victim: that much was certain. The woman had been getting on everyone's nerves lately, most importantly his. If he had a million fingers and a million toes he still couldn't count the number of jokes she had made in the past week alone about his age relative to the rest of the Astral Knights. That wasn't something he had any control over! How was he ever to know, prior to being Called, that he was another one in a long line of reincarnations of the elemental spirit of the earth?

It truly wasn't fair, though. While the other six knights had been Called in the prime of their lives, Molok had been Called just when he was preparing to resign himself to winding down the rest of his life. That meant he was physically stuck for the rest of his mortal existence in this body. True, it was unusually fit, and could take down those half his age should such a thing ever be needed. But it was still _old_.

And old, apparently, was a four-letter word with only three letters.

If the concept of age as a bane of the world were something tangible, Molok would destroy that too. He'd never even encountered such a prejudice until he had been Called and had come into contact with other people from other, stranger cultures. It was absolutely ridiculous! Age was a symbol of victory, of weathering the trials of the mortal realm and coming out with (ideally speaking) a polished, insightful personal philosophy to pass down onto younger ones, who would then go on to further refine such things.

But to someone of Zoniha's ilk, age was weakness, something to be mocked. Age was _sickness,_ even.

What an absurd idea.

And if he were any less of a man, Molok would destroy himself for starting to buy into it.


	6. invidia

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_**invidia – envy**_

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It was easy for Zhael to accept being jealous of Lilith. That bitch had everything—body, brains, boy...who _wouldn't_ be jealous of a superwoman like her? And Zhael would bet that Lilith knew everyone was jealous of her, and revelled in it. That was how it always went. Zhael knew the sentiment all too well from being in the performance industry. Bitch, indeed.

It was much more difficult to accept that she was also jealous of Zoniha. No one messed with Zoniha, and that meant _no one._ It may have been Zoniha's intimidating exoticness, it may have been the fact that she radiated the aura of a human tank even though she looked more like a delicate porcelain doll, it may have just been that Mihaele favored an element supposedly inclined towards the lawful good alignment (although truth be told Zoniha probably fell pretty close to the chaotic end of the spectrum).

Zoniha would never have had any problems ascending the ranks in show business. That girl was built for the profession in both senses of the term. She would never have had closet pedophiles leering at her from behind their desks, or misogynistic headliners shooing her off-stage far before her timeslot was finished, or well-intentioned fans gently suggesting that maybe she should make herself look a little older, or wear such-and-such clothing because it was more fashionable.

And Zoniha certainly wouldn't have gone back to a crappy little apartment on the edges of downtown and cried herself to sleep over any of those things. Zoniha was far too with it, too sophisticated and cultured to even think of indulging in such childish behaviors.

And for that, Zhael hated Zoniha even more than she hated Lilith.

Because what kind of person would she be if she didn't feel an anvil of guilt dropped on her shoulders for every spiteful thought, every ill-wish she directed at her platonic soulmate?


	7. superbia

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_**superbia – pride**_

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The dual nature of Bulzeeb's adopted namesake amused him. Depending on whom you asked, he was either the lord of the flies...or the lord of the high place.

Everyone regarded him with the respect worthy of someone of the second title, though. Anyone who thought to regard him with the respect worthy of someone of the first title was usually dead before they finished expressing the sentiment to him.

Bulzeeb was not a man given to boasting. Boasting was the hobby of fools—no matter whether the boasting actually had a degree of truth to it. But if a _demonstration_ of his power and strength was what was needed for a particular point in time, well, he certainly wasn't going to argue with it. It usually served to either intimidate the victim into silence and inaction, or provoke him into a fight with Bulzeeb—that is, a death wish.

The boy (probably a man by this point in time) known as Bomberman was an entirely different story. Bomberman had controlled it fairly well, but Bulzeeb had known the first time he'd fought him that Bomberman had been scared out of his wits. And though Bomberman was clearly talented in battle, he had still been a boy when he first crossed paths with Bulzeeb. He also seemed to have been in the primary stages of some sort of mental trauma, if the intelligence reports regarding him after the deaths of Artemis and Orion could be trusted. Bulzeeb took it to mean that Bomberman was perhaps emotionally brittle, or had silly ideals about not taking lives. The two tended to go hand in hand, Bulzeeb had found over the years.

But despite all of those factors—factors that worked in Bulzeeb's favor—Bomberman had _won_ that first battle five years ago.

Bulzeeb still could not fathom it, and he intensely disliked that such a seemingly insignificant encounter would rile him up like this. Where had he gone wrong? It was true that he hadn't been able to employ his elemental powers, stripped from him as they were by Mihaele decades ago and just recently regained. But that didn't account for the increased physical strength and reflexes granted to him as a demigod, or the years of experience that he had on Bomberman.

None of it made sense. And when things didn't make sense, Bulzeeb could not control them.

Losing control once was enough, no matter how long ago it was.

He would not lose control again.

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**Review if you will, flame if you must. AND GO TO HELL, SNOW.**

**-Sora G. Silverwind**  
_**and who am I to pretend that this is more than I can carry?**_


End file.
